


Alta pressione

by breathechoes (bluedreaming), kaithartic (bluedreaming)



Category: EXO (Band), Red Velvet (K-pop Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Alternate Universe - Space, Gen, Genocide, Healing, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy References, M/M, discussion of consent and related issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-04
Updated: 2015-12-04
Packaged: 2018-04-30 07:00:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5154629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluedreaming/pseuds/breathechoes, https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluedreaming/pseuds/kaithartic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He notices the green eyes, first."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alta pressione

**Author's Note:**

  * For [drainbamage954 (cats_cradle6766)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cats_cradle6766/gifts).



> The title is from [Alta pressione](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4lNPAdiDOM) by Ludovico Einaudi. [Fuori Dal Mondo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuori_Dal_Mondo%22) ost  
> This is inspired by Troye Sivan's [DKLA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bunU3OwGTQ) feat. Tkay Maidza. inspired as in, I thought about the song while I was writing, kind of, maybe, a little bit  
> You might be interested to know that **Fuori Dal Mondo** is Italian for _out of this world_.

 

"Shut up," Seulgi says, palm flat to the wall next to Baekhyun’s head, his ears still ringing with the force of the impact. He blinks, swallows, allowing the reflexive grin to spread across his face, a default setting he can’t seem to turn off.

_("If you smile, they can’t hurt you.")_

"Getting a little excited there?" he asks her, winking lasciviously. She looks entirely unimpressed, and after a moment he lets his grin slip, just a little.

"Do you ever turn off?" she asks, and sighs, letting her hand fall to her side, the softness of her saec-skin jacket silence as the bunches smooth.

"Never," Baekhyun replies, but it sounds less like a retort and more like a admission of defeat. He doesn’t like it, but he’s too tired to argue with his brain, to put on a better face. Seulgi is safe, mostly, and he has to let his guard down sometimes.

"You know what they say?" Seulgi asks, even though it’s obvious that it’s a rhetorical question, as she steps back, the sound of her boots metallic against the floor of the bridge. "If you don’t reboot often enough, you risk a crash."

"I’m not an engine or a computer or some kind of device," Baekhyun glares, "I don’t even have any enhancements." He eyes her prosthetic leg, but then remembers how she got it, and stops that argument in its tracks. There are some places you don’t go. _Ever._ The metal wall is curved behind his back, cold, but he doesn’t dare move yet, not when Seulgi’s anger is overlaid with something that looks far too much like pity to sit comfortably in his roiling stomach.

"You’re a person," Seulgi snaps back, "and you’d better remember that." She purses her lips then, setting her hand on her hip. "Anyway, before you pulled out your inner ass, I was going to ask you—"

"Did you find a copilot?" Baekhyun asks, cutting her off. She glares at him, but he just waves that away, finally daring to take a step forward. _In my own bridge, no less._ He really has to cut Seulgi’s intimidation game off.

"I don’t know," she says, arching a brow. "You tell me, since you were in such a rush to interrupt." She waits then, silent, waiting for him to crack. _Don’t do it._ But Baekhyun already knows he’s going to lose, knew it as soon as he opened the hatch for her to step in. He’s always playing a losing game, here.

"Fine," he says, slumping against the wall again, then wincing as his head collides with a protruding bolt. "I’m sorry for interrupting."

"‘And I won't interrupt again’," Seulgi prompts him, grinning, now that she’s won her little game.

"And I won’t interrupt again," Baekhyun says, wincing inwardly, but it’s done.

"Excellent!" she says, rubbing her hands together in delight, _now that you’ve done your ‘subdue Byun Baekhyun routine for the day’_ but he doesn’t say anything, lest they repeat the whole tiresome exercise. Baekhyun doesn’t know why he always has to do this, play the dominance game, every single time.

He’s tired. Tired, and he misses his old copilot, but Sehun _lucky jerk_ is off skirting the outer planets with a certain Do Kyungsoo and Baekhyun’s pretty sure that planets aren’t the only things that are getting skirted. _Or pantsed._ He shakes the thought out of his head, _don’t want to go there_.

"So who is it?" he asks, both because there’s no cat to suffer the consequences of his curiosity, but also because he spends more time in the ship than anywhere else and he really does want to know who his new copilot is going to be. In a lot of ways, it’s like getting married. _And I never was a fan of blind dating._ He looks at Seulgi, trying not to appear too interested and failing miserably. She just looks at him for a moment, before lifting a finger to her belt.

"You’ll meet them tomorrow!" she says, and there’s an evil sparkle in her eye, her hair swirling as she turns and heads out the hatch again.

"Wait a minute!" Baekhyun shouts behind her, "that’s unfair and you know it!"

"I don’t know anything," Seulgi says over her shoulder, and laughs, the sound fading as the hatch slides shut again. Baekhyun is left, scowling at the metal, and wondering why he even bothers.

 

Baekhyun doesn’t like getting out of bed before he has to, and when he’s stuck, docked on the arm and waiting for the next assignment, there’s absolutely no reason to wake up before at least lunch time. Which does absolutely nothing to explain why he’s lying, wide awake in his bunk, eyes tracing the invisible constellations of the underside of the bunk above him, the light muted in the pseudo night.

_("What’s the first thing I should know about the Academy?"_

_"Sleep when you can or you’ll regret it.")_

His mind is too busy to sleep, thoughts sliding through so quickly that he only catches their tail ends as they slip between his metaphorical fingers. It’s frustrating, because he knows he needs to process something that’s bothering and yet he doesn’t even know what it is.

"This is ridiculous," he mutters to himself, chewing on a puffy bottom lip as he flips himself up, barely missing grazing his head on the bunk below him, and waits for the room to stop spinning as the blood rushes from his head. Bare feet on the cold floor, Baekhyun does what he always does when he’s thinking too much, losing grip on the _here_ ; he heads for the bridge, sitting in the chair as he pulls his knees up under his chin, bony jaw jabbing into his kneecaps as he retraces the path of the ship through the charts, transport history, and reminds himself of exactly who he is.

"I’m Byun Baekhyun," he says quietly, "born and raised on Sneon, before I hitched a ride on a Salny tanker because I didn’t want to go to school, and ended up in Sector 7." He doesn’t think about the why, or the how, focusing on the "was" and it slowly rebuilds the scaffolding in his mind, that keeps his thoughts steady, slows the angry torrent of sounds and images as they stick to the structure and sort themselves into a past.

_("Did you hear about what happened to Sneon?")_

His implant beeps, the vibration muted, but he still can’t get used to the way it jarrs his skull; probably the result of only getting it after he hit puberty and his skull bones were too set to take to it properly, or at least that’s what the medic had said, looking at him with the concern furrowed between her brow, but maybe that was just Seungwan, too kind to pull out the sociopolitical jokes.

He’s heard them all before anyway.

Your new copilot is here.

Baekhyun makes a face. If Seulgi is transmitting, that means she hasn’t come along, and she knows how well he hits it off with new people.

Not very well, depending on the person. He still remembers the Heir-Elect of 青岛, and how he’d somehow managed to insult him within five seconds of opening his mouth. _But how was I supposed to know he was deathly allergic to 醇, his planet’s main economic export?_ His transmitter buzzes again, and Baekhyun winces, closing his eyes against the sudden headache.

Move your fat ass out of bed.

You know how I feel about the transmitter. His fingers fly when he’s annoyed, and headaches are one of Baekhyun’s least favourite things, well, apart from things that— _no need to go there_. He lets his head rest on the pillow for a moment.

Seulgi doesn’t reply, but Baekhyun knows it’s only a matter of minutes before she’s on his back again, so he groans, throwing his arms out in a stretch and grazing his knuckles on the metal wall _you think I’d learn_ but he doesn’t, he never learns.

_(I’m pretty sure you don’t learn because that way you always know you’re wrong to start, you always take the path of least resistance.)_

"Ouch," he groans to himself, fingers curling into his palm, arm drawn into his chest as he rolls over the edge of the bunk and lands on the floor, more abrupt than he’d been expecting. So hard, in fact, that when he glances at the stinging pain on his knees, there are a few beads of red standing out amidst the abraded skin and isn’t that just like him, meeting a new copilot while sporting skinned knees from rolling out of bed.

_Great._

But he stops feeling sorry for himself, because there are worse things that can happen, _much worse things_ , and limps over to the compartment in the wall that slides open automatically, revealing a selection of blue and white articles of clothing, from which Baekhyun extracts a shirt and a pair of Academy-grade pants, because he might at least try to make a good impression.

Blinking at his reflection in the mirror, Baekhyun examines the puffy bruised-looking skin under his eyes and considers touching his appearance up, but one glance at the screen and he decides he’d rather not risk another message from Seulgi. He _really_ doesn’t like headaches, or worse yet, the stuff Seungwan gave him to take after he gets one.

_("I’m sorry, Baekhyun, I don’t really have anything for Sneon—"_

_"Just give me whatever.")_

As soon as he keys into the system, he can see the flag from the person standing outside the hatch, waiting to be let in, and Baekhyun authorizes the entry as the new copilot places their hand on the palm screen, and he saves it to the security settings.

He sees Sehun’s setting there, still, as he scrolls by, and when he presses the key to delete it, there’s a kind of twinge in his chest, even though they were never anything more than really good friends, for the moment, but he hasn’t heard from Sehun in a while and even though he knows that Sehun is far out there, it’s not like he’s always on the dark side of the moon, or that dark sides even exist anymore outside of teen supernatural romance, which always seemed silly to him since there are so many kinds of species spread throughout the universe. _Why bother inventing imaginary ones?_

The hatch slides open, and Baekhyun sees his new copilot for the first time.

 

He notices the green eyes, first. Green, like —

_("I heard that Sneon was beautiful."_

_Shut up!")_

Baekhyun blinks. It’s a—guy, right? Maybe? If there’s one thing he’s learned over the years, it’s not to make assumptions about gender, especially not when there are so many variations and permutations among all the different people in the universe. _Something I learned the hard way._

"Hi," Baekhyun says, "I’m Baekhyun, ‘he’ is fine, though Seulgi probably already told you that, but that’s probably the only honest thing she told me and you shouldn’t believe anything else she told you—" _and I’m babbling again_ , he thinks as he talks, sighing internally, but the new copilot only looks vaguely amused, not outright disgusted like the first time he met Kyungsoo. _There’s a very good reason that it’s Kyungsoo and Sehun who are copilots now, only part of it is Baekhyun’s inherent desire for self-preservation._

_("Did you know, before you left, that something was going to happen?"_

_"I was just an irresponsible kid."_

_"But why did you go, why then?")_

"I’m Yixing," the new copilot says, "‘he’ will also do," and he’s—Baekhyun can’t believe it, but—it looks like he might actually be laughing. "So when Seulgi said that you were one of the best pilots the Academy has produced in the last decade, and you’re ranked the #2 crackshot of your graduating session, that was a lie?" He grins, dimples digging into his cheeks as he adjusts the strap of the bag over his shoulder, bringing a hand up to rest on the frame, still standing in the open hatchway.

Baekhyun huffs, sticking out his bottom lip. "Well," he says, rolling his eyes, "I guess a few more things might be true—" He’s cut off by a sudden buzzing, and the way he’s standing, head tilted to one side, the vibration jars his skull at that impossibly perfect _terrible_ angle that sets his teeth on edge, red blooming across his vision before he blinks, eyes suddenly wet.

"Dammit Seulgi," he groans, hand clutching his head, fingers practically clawing at his skull and he’s back to the metal hull, Yixing peering at him with a worried expression on his face, hand resting, palm-flat, on the wall next to Baekhyun’s head.

"Are you okay?" Yixing asks, voice soft with concern, and Baekhyun finds himself staring into his green eyes again, so green, like the green grass on the slopes of the Dresim foothills—

"I'm fine," he says, an inexplicable rush of anger surging up to clamp around his throat and he finds himself doing what he always does when he's upset, when he's hurt, lashing out at anyone who's trying to help and pushes Yixing away, hands hitting his solar plexus and he can hear the surprised sound of Yixing gasping for a breath as Baekhyun turns away, one hand clamped over his eye as he gropes towards the hallway and the galley where he keeps the meds Seungwan gave him. _It’s never been this bad before._ His thoughts are whirling but added is the fear that they’ll have to take the transmitter out, something that will limit his future employment opportunities and he doesn’t want—

there are soft fingers, barely brushing his head, and Baekhyun is about to do something drastic about the violation of personal space when he feels the pain slowly start to siphon off, the screaming tenseness in his muscles softening and it feels like he’s gradually liquefying as he slowly slumps to the ground, finally sinking against the metal wall, limp but pain free.

He takes a deep breath, tries to think and—

_fuck this shit._

 

Baekhyun didn’t come away from the Academy with only a record in crack-shooting and killer piloting skills. He also took a 合氣道 elective for every one of the five grueling years he was there and when he goes from limp on the floor—pain free and loose in a way that only a full yoga stretch session seems to be able to achieve—to shoving Yixing against the wall, palms slamming into the metal of the hull so hard that the sound echoes through the ship, it’s thanks to every millilitre of sweat and blood he’s put into his training. And staring at Yixing, faces so close their noses are almost touching, Baekhyun feels proud of himself.

And then he notices the way he’s breathing heavily and Yixing is breathing heavily and the bead of sweat on Yixing’s upper lip and the way his eyes are blown wide in surprise and something that looks at lot like—respect?—and there’s a twitch in his lower body that has Baekhyun suddenly feeling uncomfortable, not because he’s sorry for shoving Yixing against the wall because the new copilot _definitely_ violated his personal space and encroached upon his health without clear consent, but because the image of Yixing pressed to the wall, trapped between Baekhyun’s arms, is definitely turning him on and he isn’t comfortable with that at all.

Baekhyun takes a step back, letting his hands fall to his sides, but still keeping his senses on high alert because he’s not sure what Yixing is going to do.

"I’m sorry," he says, and meets Yixing’s gaze, not looking away. "But you need to apologize too."

Yixing just looks at him, still flush against the wall and it looks, strangely enough, like he belongs there, molded into the metal.

"You’re the Sneon survivor," Yixing says, and Baekhyun closes his eyes and bunches his fingers into fists, the sharp pinpricks of pain in his palms as his fingernails break the skin holding him back. There’s still an indent in the metal of the wall, from where his palms hit the metal panel.

"That’s none of your business," Baekhyun says, so angry that his voice breaks. "Tluethte," he adds, as an afterthought, because it’s clear now where Yixing is from. _And he used his healing on me without my permission and without asking if it was even safe._

"You have a loose transmitter," Yixing says, ignoring him, "and it slipped with that last buzz and started compressing a major nerve." His voice is calm, measured, as though he’s trying not to provoke a panic around an unpredictable patient, but Baekhyun can feel his blood running cold anyway.

"I—what?" Baekhyun just stands there, confused and angry and frustrated and. . .scared.

 

There’s a beep, the sound of the shipcom turning on, and then he can hear Seulgi’s voice, and is that Seungwan in the background?

"Baekhyun?" she asks, and she sounds worried. "What’s going on? Your transmitter went offline." Baekhyun snaps his head over to Yixing, still leaning against the wall, who nods, stepping forward into the scope of the camera.

"His transmitter wasn’t properly implanted and every time it buzzed it moved," he says, voice calm as though he’s reciting a report, and Baekhyun wonders what Yixing’s background is. He makes a mental note to corner Seulgi as soon as he sees her next, and use everything at his disposal to wring a full disclosure out of her. And he’s not above using what he’s now understanding to be a ‘grave risk to personal health’ as leverage.

"Oh m—" Seulgi is shoved aside and Seungwan appears, looking concerned and so apologetic that it’s almost guilty.

"I’m so sorry, Baekhyun," she says, "I just assumed, because you were the only Sneon—"

"It’s okay," Baekhyun says, because it’s not her fault either. It’s not anyone’s fault, except the Salny tank medic and there’s no use crying over leaked frudroate.

_(‘Distance makes the heart grow fonder,’ they say, but Baekhyun wonders if they know what they’re talking about.)_

"Can you come in to the medlab?" Seungwan asks, and Baekhyun sighs, looking down at his bare feet, only now feeling the cold of the metal leaching into his skin.

"I guess I need a transmitter before I take any further assignments," he says to Seulgi, hovering at the edge of the screen, and it’s not really a question. She nods, but her expression doesn’t seem exasperated, _it had better not_ , so Baekhyun nods, ending the call.

"Be careful," Yixing says, over his shoulder, and Baekhyun turns to glare at him.

"We’re not done—" he waves a hand at the dented wall, his head that doesn’t hurt anymore, "—with this." His eyes, fixing Yixing’s green ones, are unyielding. "If we’re going to be copilots, we have to trust each other, and that means not doing things without talking about it."

Yixing nods, the motion jerky because of the tenseness in his shoulders, and Baekhyun lets himself pause, take a deep breath.

"Thanks," he says, his voice softer, and flashes Yixing a small smile. "You can take the top bunk, so settle in and I’ll be back."

"See you later," Yixing says, and waves as Baekhyun pulls on a pair of shoes and steps out the hatch.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I'd like to—not apologize, because I'm absolutely not sorry about the story I wrote—but I'd like to clarify that due to the nature of the story, I wasn't able to perhaps fully explore the _kabedon_ theme of this exchange, and ended up using a more literal interpretation of the phrase/word ([definition](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabedon#K)) as I wasn't comfortable with implicating anything of a dubcon nature.
> 
>  **Prompts used:**  
>  _to varying degrees of butchering_  
>  1) A needed a new copilot and was open to the idea. A just wasn't quite prepared for B though. - space au  
> 5) "I love deadlines. I love the sound they make as they go whooshing past" - cr. Douglas Adams. The problem isn't that A sets limits, the problem is that B doesn't seem to think rules exist. which I interpreted to mean "let's incorporate ideas from _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_! as well as taking the idea of limits and rules and using them in a probably completely different way, to bring up the issue of consent and personal agency, which I unfortunately didn't have time to explore fully  
>  6) Playing hard to get sometimes has consequences. blink and you'll miss it  
> 


End file.
